7 Tips To Balance Work and Life To Reach Your Goals
Summary: It starts gradually. You miss a friend's birthday. You skip the gym for the third week in a row. Your team misses a deadline you thought someone else was managing.
This is the quiet cost of entrepreneurship when ambition outruns alignment. The same drive that fuels growth can, without warning, start draining the energy, clarity, and life you worked so hard to build.
But it doesn’t have to stay that way.
Balance isn’t about slowing down or splitting time evenly between business and life. It’s about building an intentional rhythm—one that evolves with your priorities and strengthens both your success and your well-being.
If you’re ready to lead differently and build momentum without sacrificing what matters most, these seven strategies will show you where to begin.
Before We Dive In: Why Balance Alone Won’t Save You
Most advice about work-life balance focuses on doing less or finding better systems. Useful, yes, but incomplete. Without strategic shifts in how you manage energy, priorities, and leadership, balance stays surface-level—a temporary fix instead of a lasting foundation.
Entrepreneurs need more than a better planner or a few more hours off. They need a system for protecting their energy, aligning their actions with their true goals, and sustaining forward momentum—even when life and business demand constant adjustment.
The seven strategies below aren’t about slowing down. They’re about stepping into your role as a strategic leader—building balance as a business asset, not a bonus.
7 Tips to Build Balance and Hit Your Goals
1. Presence Isn’t Optional—It’s Strategic
One entrepreneur once described their schedule as "spinning plates while walking a tightrope." The reality? They were trying to manage everything at once—and losing ground everywhere.
Presence is about mastering the plate you’re holding right now.
When you're fully engaged, whether that’s leading a team meeting, closing a deal, or simply listening to your child recount their day, you reduce the noise that fractures your attention.
You finish what you start.
You lead more cleanly, with fewer dropped balls and less mental drag.
Presence doesn’t mean perfection. It means performance, where you are fully in the moment, making better decisions faster, and leaving less rework behind you.
Presence isn’t a luxury. It’s a business discipline that protects your time, energy, and results.
2. Prioritize by Principles, Not by To-Do Lists
Clarity doesn’t come from a better to-do list. It comes from knowing what drives your decisions. Principles help you define how your business operates. They act as a filter for your time, your energy, and your attention. When your day fills up fast, you rely on those principles to stay focused on what matters most.
This means knowing what you say yes to and what you say no to before the pressure shows up.
If you prioritize quality over speed, you won’t take on rushed work that compromises results. If you value relationships over reach, you’ll focus on meaningful connections instead of chasing attention.
When you believe your business should support your life, you’ll make decisions that protect your time and energy.
Leading from principle gives you back control. It keeps your decision-making aligned and your growth intentional.
3. Define Goals That Align With the Business and Life You’re Building
Growth without direction is expensive. It drains time, energy, and attention. You hire the wrong people, chase the wrong opportunities, and build systems you later have to undo. You look up and realize the business has moved forward, but not in the direction you intended.
That’s what happens when goals are unclear or disconnected from what matters most.
Defining goals is a leadership function.
It sets the course for how you make decisions, what your team focuses on, and what success looks like in your company.
Without that clarity, it’s easy to stay busy and still wonder if you’re making progress.
You need clear goals in three areas:
- How your business grows
- How your business operates
- How you show up as the leader
Each one supports the others. If you’re only focused on revenue and your operations are unstable, you can’t scale. If the business is growing and you’re running on empty, it won’t hold.
When these goals are clearly defined and designed to work together, they provide direction. They become a filter that supports confident decisions and measurable progress.
If you’re putting in the effort but not getting the outcomes you expected, it may be time to revisit your goals. Clarity here sets the stage for sustainable success.
4. Bring Your Goals and Priorities Into Alignment
You can have clear goals and strong priorities, but if they compete with each other, follow-through will stall. The brain can’t commit fully to two opposing ideas. One wins, and the other quietly gets pushed aside—usually the one that requires growth or change.
This is why you can have a goal you’re excited about and still find yourself avoiding it. You think it’s a discipline problem, but it’s a conflict of belief.
We call this a competing commitment. You say you want one thing, but something else—something deeper—is pulling in a different direction.
For example, if you set a goal to work out two or three times a week, the plan makes sense, and you’ve made space for it. But underneath that goal is a belief that success only counts if the number on the scale goes down. If it doesn’t, the effort starts to feel pointless.
You skip a session, motivation drops, and the cycle starts again. Those ideas are in direct conflict with each other, and one of them won’t happen.
The same thing happens in business. You set a goal to increase visibility but believe that being seen opens you to criticism. You commit to delegation but believe good leadership means staying in control. One side drives action. The other blocks it.
Don't try to push harder if you feel resistance around something you know you want. Look for the conflict. Identify the belief that doesn’t match the goal.
Once those pieces are aligned, the pressure lifts. Motivation returns. Execution gets lighter.
5. Let Go So You Can Grow
One of the most difficult transitions entrepreneurs face is moving from builder to leader. When you're building, you're involved in everything. You carry the weight, solve the problems, and stay close to every detail. However, as the business grows, what once worked has started to break down. Not because you're failing, but because you're still trying to hold everything together yourself.
Responsibilities accumulate slowly. Client work, scheduling, team support, and financial decisions. The plate fills up, but nothing comes off. You continue to do what you’ve always done. Eventually, something slips, and when it does, it feels like failure. In reality, it’s a signal that you’ve outgrown the way you’re operating.
Letting go is not about stepping back or giving up control; it's about embracing a new perspective. It’s about creating space to lead.
That might mean delegating client communication, stepping away from task management, or removing yourself from the day-to-day so you can think and make decisions from a higher level. You can’t take on what’s next if you’re still holding everything from before.
Start small. Let someone else own the scheduling. Give your team the permission to make decisions without needing to check with you. Choose one task this week that no longer needs your fingerprints on it, and step back. That’s where the shift begins.
This change won’t always feel comfortable. But it will give you the clarity and capacity to lead. If you're pushing hard and still feel maxed out, the next move may not be about doing more. It may be about doing less, with intention.
6. Stay Focused by Simplifying the Way You Plan
Most entrepreneurs have plenty of drive. What’s harder to hold onto is direction. Without it, the days fill up, the list gets longer, and it’s hard to tell what moved the business forward.
That’s why we use a planning rhythm that brings clarity without complication. One annual goal sets the vision. That breaks into four key initiatives—one for each quarter. Each quarter breaks into three monthly priorities. Then each week has one clear point of focus.
It gives the work structure. It makes decisions easier. And it replaces the constant question of “What should I be doing right now?” with a clear next step.
You don’t have to implement the whole system today. Start by answering this question: What’s one result that would make this week feel meaningful?
Focus there. That’s where momentum starts.
7. Stop “Earning” Rest. Start Planning It.
Most business owners treat rest like a reward. It comes after the sprint, after the launch, after the deadline. The problem is that by the time rest feels earned, it’s already overdue.
Rest isn’t a luxury or a finish line. It’s a business strategy. It gives you space to think, to recover, and to lead without running on empty.
This is why we schedule rest into the calendar just like any other priority.
Whether it’s a Friday with no meetings, a quiet week after a big push, or even a single afternoon protected from interruption, rest has to be scheduled because it rarely shows up on its own.
Leadership takes energy. Strategy takes space. You are a resource, and resources need to be restored.
If everything on your calendar supports the business but nothing supports your capacity, it’s time to shift that. Look ahead. Block the time. Protect it. And don’t wait until you’re burned out to realize how essential it was.
Balance Isn’t a Destination. It’s a Decision
Balance doesn’t show up when things finally calm down. It’s something you create, choice by choice, as you shape a business that supports the life you want to lead. It doesn’t require perfection. It requires intention. And it begins with how you protect your time, your focus, and your capacity to lead.
For some, that means reclaiming space to think. For others, it’s stepping back from the day-to-day so the business can grow without constant oversight. Whatever it looks like, it starts with a rhythm that aligns your energy, your goals, and your way of operating.
This is the kind of work we love doing at Your Biz Rules. We help entrepreneurs create businesses that are sustainable, profitable, and enjoyable to run. With the right clarity and systems in place, growth stops feeling like pressure and starts feeling aligned. Clients breathe deeper, think more clearly, and lead from a place that feels good.
So ask yourself: If you stopped leading from exhaustion and started building with alignment, what kind of business and life could you create?
ABOUT
Leslie Hassler
Leslie Hassler is a dynamic author, speaker, business strategist, and founder of Your Biz Rules. Leslie empowers entrepreneurs to cultivate strategies that lead to sustainable growth and increased profitability while avoiding burnout.
With a proven track record in business, finance, mindset, marketing, and entrepreneurship, Leslie’s holistic approach has helped businesses across all industries overcome challenges and thrive in a balanced manner. Many business owners who are experts in their field come to Leslie and Your Biz Rules after some measure of success to understand how to run a business that meets their business and their life goals.
Leslie shares her expertise in her books First This, Then That and Scaling Rich. She has been recognized on stages across the United States, including prestigious events such as the National Association of Women Business Owners and the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council. Her insights have also been featured in notable publications like Entrepreneur.com.
Leslie is a mother of two, avid traveler, Past President of NAWBO DFW, and alumni of the Goldman Sachs 10K Small Business program. Leslie is WBENC, HUB, and AI Mastery Certified.